June 23, 1988.
Easy to remember, because it’s my birthday.
And the day I thought that, at last, humans were serious about the 800 pound gorilla of environmental issues.
Senior NASA scientist James Hansen, whose work I had been following for some time, came before the Senate, on a brutally hot summer day – and laid out his findings. He was pushing the envelope of what the data could tell, but his instincts were telling him that what he was seeing was real.
How did he do?
I made a point to ask a number of senior scientists this question at last December’s American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Hint:
Recent Hansen interview in the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/19/james-hansen-nasa-scientist-climate-change-warning
Happy Birthday Greenperson!
Yes. From me too 🙂
Note the drop off from 1991 – Pinituba had a cooling effect for a couole of years, dropping the baseline, then we had the iceland volcano a few years later – once again a slight abberation to the base line, but the trend continues ever up, and now showing signs of acceleration
One problem the public has is understanding that these are measures of *surface temperature*, whereas global warming has to do with *accumulated heat*. The ENSO cycle is heat moving back and forth between the ocean and the atmosphere, while melting ice releases…”fossil coolth”.
Gavin Schmidt in Real Climate:
=> 30 years after Hansen’s testimony